Building Students’ Prior Knowledge to Support Novel Reading

Books not only introduce us to new knowledge but also take us deeper into things we already know about. I understood totalitarianism, but I understood it at a much deeper level after I read Yeonmi Park’s 288-page firsthand account of a harrowing escape from North Korea, In Order to Live. I knew the term caste system, but I didn’t truly understand it until I read Isabel Wilkerson’s Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents. I knew that stress can have negative effects on my physical well-being, but, again, I reached a much deeper understanding after reading Bessel van der Kolk’s The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma. And I thought I knew a lot about Martin Luther King Jr.—until I read Jonathan Eig’s remarkable in-depth biography, King: A Life. There is a profundity found in these books—a depth not found in click-and-go reading. A deeper drilling down into areas where we previously possessed surface-level thinking.

It would be a mistake to think this deepening of knowledge happens only through the reading of nonfiction. Fiction has enriched my understanding of several topics as well. Rebecca Makkai’s The Great Believers taught me a lot about the AIDS crisis of the 1980s. Jodi Picoult and Jennifer Finney Boylan’s Mad Honey opened my eyes to the transgender experience. Danya Kukafka’s Notes on an Execution made me think about the death penalty in different ways, even though that was a topic I had been reflecting upon for years.

Fiction not only deepens our understanding of topics but also develops skill sets we are trying to build in our students. As Christine Seifert notes in the Harvard Business Review, recent research in neuroscience has found that reading fiction helps develop “self-discipline, self-awareness, creative problem-solving, empathy, learning agility, adaptiveness, flexibility, positivity, rational judgment, generosity, and kindness” (2020). Reading fiction deepens our knowledge of the world, but doing so creates an added bonus: It deepens our understanding of what it means to be a good human being.

How to Help Students Build Prior Knowledge Through Reading Books

One of my favorite poems is Wilfred Owen’s “Dulce et Decorum Est,” which captures the horrors of the Western Front during World War I. In the poem, the narrator describes a gas attack and the image of a comrade who was unable to get his gas mask on in time. This haunts the narrator as he witnesses this tragedy unfold through the panes of his gas mask:

Dim through the misty panes and thick green light,

As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.

In all my dreams before my helpless sight,

He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning. (29)

One could read this poem and get an understanding of the horrors of the war. But I would argue that readers gain deeper meaning if they know the context in which it was created. Before composing this poem, Owen enlisted and was sent to the front line. During battle, he was caught in the blast of a trench mortar shell and spent several days unconscious, lying among the remains of his fellow soldiers. Eventually rescued and hospitalized, he was diagnosed with what was then called shell shock (PTSD is today’s terms). While in the hospital, he suffered many nightmares, which inspired him to begin writing war poetry. One of several poems he wrote while hospitalized was “Dulce et Decorum Est.”

Knowing Owen’s history and picturing him suffering from these horrific nightmares while hospitalized add a level of poignancy to one’s reading of the poem. But, wait, the story does not end there. After Owen “recovered,” he was given the option to return home; instead, he chose to return to the front, where he ended up leading numerous assaults on enemy positions. In one of these assaults, Owen was killed in action one week before the end of World War I. His parents received word of his death on the very day that the war ended.

The poem reads differently when we know that Owen died a mere seven days before the armistice was signed. Even after I taught this poem for several years, knowing Owen’s story led me to get a lump in my throat every time I revisited it.

The notion that having prior knowledge leads the reader to gain deeper understanding is certainly true when it comes to reading novels as well. Recently, I read Julie Otsuka’s The Swimmers, which delves into a mother’s gradual descent into dementia. Here is the narrator describing a visit to her mother in a care facility:

Every time you leave you bend over and give her a kiss. Sometimes she pulls away. Other times she looks at you and offers up an indifferent cheek. Always, as you are walking away—you can’t help yourself—you turn around and look back. Sometimes she is watching you, but she doesn’t seem to recognize your face. Sometimes she is gazing off into space. Sometimes she is leaning over in her wheelchair and staring down, intently, with fierce concentration, at the top of her feet. She has already forgotten you. Today, however, when you turn around and look back, her hand is half-raised in midair and slowly waving goodbye. (2023, 169)

If you’ve never had a loved one who suffered from dementia, perhaps this passage gives you a sense of what it is like. I say “a sense” because unless you have been there, you don’t understand it. Reading this passage brought me back to my mother’s memory care facility, and it stirred up several related memories of the last year of her life. It brought back the drip, drip, drip of losing someone you love. I lived it, and that experience brought a deep resonance to my reading of Otsuka’s passage.

The value of possessing important prior knowledge has ramifications for how we structure our novel units. Think about the hardest book you teach—the one that keeps you up at night before the unit starts. I would surmise that one of the reasons that particular book is difficult for students is because it is far away from their prior knowledge. The Great Gatsby becomes a shallower reading experience if you enter the first chapter without knowledge of the Jazz Age or the mores of the Roaring Twenties. The Grapes of Wrath is a harder read without knowledge of the Great Depression or the Dust Bowl. The Scarlet Letter is more difficult if you enter into it without an understanding of seventeenth-century Puritanism. And so on. It’s not necessarily the words on the page that make these books hard; it is the lack of prior knowledge. 

I learned this through many years of teaching Robert Louis Stevenson’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (2022). When I first taught this classic, I began by planning the unit backward. I asked myself what I wanted my students to take from this reading experience. I decided I wanted them to consider the duality found in human beings, which is asserted when Jekyll states “that man is not truly one, but truly two” (70). Stevenson is suggesting that there is good in every bad person and bad in every good person, and I wanted my students to think about the nature of temptation and what that means in a modern context. (Early in the novella, Jekyll is in control of Hyde, but as the story progresses and Hyde increasingly finds pleasure in performing evil acts, Jekyll loses control. Over time, temptation overpowers him.) I wanted my students to get past the overly simplistic interpretation that humans are half good and half evil—to realize it is much more nuanced than that. This is a story of what can happen when you begin to give in to temptation and the internal conflict that arises. All of this wrapped in a tightly constructed murder mystery.

But here’s the thing. When I taught the novella for the first time, I didn’t teach it very well. It always took me three or four years—and sometimes longer—to refine any new novel unit. Some lessons were ditched; others, revised or created. There is a molding process around the teaching of any novel, and it was during this process that I realized the one area in which my Jekyll and Hyde unit fell short—I wasn’t front-loading it enough.

I once heard Jeff Wilhelm say that the setting of a novel is not simply about the time and place of the characters but also about the time and place of the author. That is, to truly understand a book, you have to understand the context in which it was written. I learned this while teaching Stevenson’s classic: a reader cannot deeply read Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde without first understanding that it was written in Scotland during the Victorian Age. Because if you have any knowledge of what life was like in Scotland in the Victorian Age, this completely changes your reading experience.

Excerpted from: To Read Stuff You Have to Know Stuff: Helping Students Build and Use Prior Knowledge by Kelly Gallagher. Copyright © 2024 by Kelly Gallagher. Published by Heinemann, Portsmouth, NH. Reprinted by permission of the Publisher. All rights reserved.